english version below
Was macht ihr hier? Was soll das Ganze? Was ist ein Klimacamp? Und wieso ist das wichtig?
Climate camp – why?
What are you doing? What is this, anyway? What is a climate camp? And why is it important?
These questions were among the most frequently asked ones by pedestrians passing by our camp last year. The answer today, same as last year, is the following:
We are doing this to shake up politics, society, and the media; to remind them of the crisis that we are all facing, that is nowhere near treated as one by any of these three groups.
The Federal Chancellor is always speaking of “man-made climate change” and thus, displacing the current discourse far away from the wording of many climate scientists declaring it a climate catastrophe. That would have been like speaking of a Cuban missile change in the 60s, a financial change in 2008, a man-made virus change since 2020. In times of crisis, usually, all the stops are pulled out, no stone is left unturned in order to mitigate the after-effects as best we can. Concerning the climate crisis, though, it’s one political error after the other; the media prefer reporting about events such as the German premier league results over publications of the IPCC; and public discourse often portrays an eco-dictatorship in which we are all “forced” to drive electric cars.
We are not willing nor able to tolerate this displacement of discourse any longer!
Therefore, we – climate activists from many different groups in Göttingen – have joined forces and made this camp possible.
It serves as a space of a lived utopia, bringing people together who have understood that we must fundamentally change our ways of living together and economizing. In doing so, structural changes take center stage, requiring political work and organization!
The camp is supposed to be a place where we can communicate outside of our bubble, where people can inform themselves about these structural changes, where organized groups can offer workshops and hold their plenums; thus, reducing obstacles for people who want to get involved in activism and don’t know where to start. For people already involved in activism, we provide the opportunity to get to know each other better and build up a powerful climate justice movement at a local level beyond the different groups.
We try to create a safe space for people who have been discriminated against and we address why the word climate crisis, or catastrophe, not only sums up collapsing ecosystems, massive greenhouse gas emissions and the biodiversity crisis, but also how societal problems – racism, sexism, classism, capitalism, ableism and homophobia – are connected to ecological processes.